


Lallybroch Grave

by missclairebelle



Series: miss clairebelle imagine prompts [2]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV), Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 17:55:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14720864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missclairebelle/pseuds/missclairebelle
Summary: Prompt: Imagine Claire and Jamie telling Jenny and Ian about Faith after they come home from France and Jenny deciding to have a grave for her at Lallybroch.





	Lallybroch Grave

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: This deals with Jamie and Claire's loss of Faith and the aftermath. If this will upset you, please pass over this and wait for the next one. It was hard to write; I do not want to unintentionally upset someone. xx. Mod Kate.

Claire had not known how she would go on in the aftermath of Paris.

But she did –– her traitorous heart beating and pushing life through her veins, duplicitous lungs oxygenating her blood, twofaced brain guiding her limbs through the motions.

So many things in the city that she once loved cleaved her open and spilled darkness into her very bones.  

 _Faith_.  She was there.  She was real. She was _almost_ theirs.

A mother on a street corner, pressing fingers along the curve of a baby-soft cheek – golden peach fuzz on milky skin catching the light.

L'Hôpital des Anges with its brooding, Gothic doors. They kept secret the remnants of moments so distant that they almost did not feel like memories, even though they would never leave her.

A faraway, unfocused look that swallowed Jamie whole mid-sentence as he tapped a spoon soft-boiled egg in the morning. He was longing for a child that he had never even seen. She could tell because it was the same look she had.

A hand mirror shattering and mirthless laugh. The worst had already happened. Seven years of bad luck be damned.  

The small things in the corner of their bedroom in Paris – an elaborate basinet with scalloped curtains on an ornate frame, a delicate Christening gown with a genderless bonnet trimmed with lace and translucent ribbon.  

The feeling of invisibility as her breasts swelled, leaking into her dress and interrupting her grief, aching when she tried to ignore it.  

Even in the darkest of rooms or the brightest of sunlight, a shadow followed her.  

The figure that haunted her at night was nameless and cloaked.

When she slept, she did not dream unless she was turning on the figure, chasing shadows.  In not a nightmare but not a dream, Claire’s fingers fumbled for the cloak.  She just needed to see what was under it.  And just when it was within reach she would wake to a sound, a feeling, a bright disruption.

( _A snort from Jamie, his hand on her breast. A skeletal branch scraping across the windowpane. Lightning saturating darkness until it touched every corner of their bedroom. Thunder rolling with such a boom that it made her teeth rattle._ )

Claire’s heart would skip and she would quietly will it to _just stop beating altogether_.

 _Faith_.

When they left Paris, a city that neither of them wanted to remember existed, she thought that the figure would let her rest.

It didn’t.  

And one night, just when she thought that she had outwitted it – her fingers curling into slippery cloak and tugging – it turned to ash.

When they finally arrived _home_ , to Lallybroch, Jamie took the lead in telling Jenny and Ian. When Claire’s fingers became restless on the table – tapping, scratching, picking, shining – Jamie stilled her hand with his, eyes never leaving his sister and brother-in-law.

“ _Beautiful_ ,” she heard him say. His voice caught like it was tripping. The amount of trust he had to have in her description, to have never seen their daughter and to call her beautiful, moved her.  “ _Our_ _Faith_.”

He blamed himself still and Claire focused her eyes on everything but his face. The lift and twist of the curtain in the breeze coming through an open window.  The slope of the soft underside of his chin into the hard column of muscle along his throat. The hollow at the base of that same throat, an indentation where her lips had rested in sleep, for comfort a thousand times.

“I had promised–”

his voice stumbled over words ––

“I broke it–– she was so––”

a struggle for adjectives ––

“ _little––_ ”

_she remembered the fluttering kicks in her belly that had said **I am here** but not quite **I am ready** ––_

“but then she… _oh_ …”

His voice faded away. At that, Claire’s face had folded in on itself and she brought her forehead to the table, slipping her hand free of Jamie’s.  Eyes closed, she was facing down the shadow in the daytime while awake now. Its back was to her and its cloak was slipping over bone.  

“She’s _gone_. She’s _dead_.  Our daughter is dead.” Her words _became_ the figure.

The hand that went to the back of her neck was delicate, cool, feminine.

 _Jenny_.

Claire could hardly remember her sister-in-long giving her any sort of prolonged physical contact ( _just a brief hug, a comforting brush of a hand_ ), but this was the first _real_ touch was a comfort.

“I feel _empty_ ,” Claire managed, her stomach pitted out and aching.  She touched her bodice, it covered tender breasts.  “And I…”

Jenny nodded at her brother and pulled a chair close to Claire, sitting, her fingers running down her back. “The milk?

Claire turned her head to rest on her arm and look at Jenny, unembarrassed but disgusted at her body’s refusal to just _move on_. “Yes.”

“Sage tea. Warm compresses. Cabbage. The last of the summer are still around.  It will help.”

Claire simply swallowed, jaw shaking from the effort of holding back tears.

“I dinna ken anything to make ye feel _normal_ again, Claire, but I promise that ye will. Someday you’ll get there. It’ll no’ feel _good_. It’ll be just as painful, but different… manageable somehow.”

Claire did not ask _how_ , but she could tell that Jenny _knew_. They were not empty words selected from a bin of platitudes.  Jenny _felt_ them.  Iit was an independent heartache, knowing that it was an empathy drawn from _some sort_ of personal experience.

Jenny’s voice was smooth, low.  It was still her, but it was a tone Claire had never heard before.

“ _A piuthar-chèile_.   _A piuthar_.”

_Sister-in-law.  Sister._

Claire just let the words sink in, eventually sitting up and _looking_ at Jamie.  His eyes were fixed on the tapestry above the mantle, boring a hole through the wall. His fingers were pulling absently at a loose thread at his shirtsleeve.

“Jenny, she was so gorgeous – she looked like him… Like Jamie.  The hair, the eyes, the ears.”  

Claire cast a look to Jamie. His eyes fell from the tapestry to the thread that he had not pulled but was winding around and around and around his ring finger – turning it purple.

Claire had said it a thousand times: she no longer blamed him, that it would have happened with or without his fight with Randall. But something in Jamie was clinging to the responsibility.  It was as if he could not make sense of their loss without imputing _some_ blame to himself.

Claire knew that her husband thought it was an otherworldly, perhaps divine, retribution for a promise made to his wife and broken.

Jenny’s eyes did not leave her sister-in-law.

“When we left Paris, I thought I could be away from her and pretend it never happened.  I could not stay, but I know I will never return to her.”

“Paris is a long way away,” Jenny said after a beat, her fingers tracing a light route along Claire’s spine. Down.  Up. Down.  Up.  “What if we… do something special here, Claire? To remember her?”

Claire heard Jamie swallow and felt his hand on her thigh under the table. Claire _knew_ it meant “ _yes_.” Her heart said “ _yes_ ,” and her mouth followed shortly thereafter.

What Jenny came up with was beautiful.  

A headstone ––

_Faith Fraser_

_a beloved daughter_

_held for a moment,_

_loved for eternity_

_1744_

Somehow, Jenny had managed to rehome a flowering bush from the side of the house to sit just above the grave marker. They were at the top of a small hill –– endless sky stretching out in all directions as far as their eyes could see.  

And Jenny had done it all in only a few days’ time.  

Claire could hardly hold her weight up and slipped to the ground on crossed legs.  Jamie followed suit.  And there, under the heady fragrance of white lilac, they sat with their hands tangled together.  

“Janet,” Jamie ground out, wiping tears away from his cheeks with the back of his hand, “ye’ve really done somethin’ beautiful for our family.”

Jenny hitched up the voluminous folds of her skirts and crouched behind her brother, slipping her arms around his shoulders. “Ye need somewhere to visit her, to have a quiet moment.”

Claire leaned into Jamie’s shoulder, raising their joined hands and kissed them before holding them over her heart.  In their hasty retreat from Paris they had only had a moment at Faith’s resting place outside of the hospital.   _This_ felt like a balm.

Without a word, Jamie took the blade he kept at his ankle –– something he kept ready even here in the comforts of the place they called home. Out of the embraces of his sister and wife, he stood easily with the _sgian dubh_ in his hand.  He cut a short branch, heavy with white flowers, and laid it along the edge of the headstone, his fingers glancing over the words. He settled back next to his wife, his arm hooking through her elbow before he took her hand.

“This is good,” he said simply.  “Fitting.”

That night, Claire dreamt of lilacs and a girl in a dress with bouncy red curls.  

The figure did not return.


End file.
